“Where the fu—” Michael flinched when a stream of yellow-gold tracer fire wound its way lazily out of the darkness before whipping past Widowmaker’s nose, the insult silenced with brutal ferocity by the lander’s lasers. “Like I was saying,” Michael continued, “where the hell is the NRA? Petty Officer Morozov.”
“Sir?”
“Go take a look and make sure we keep the ramp up until I’m happy the area is secure.”
Michael was beginning to worry. Widowmaker was not the lander it once had been: an elusive, fleeting shadow cloaked by its chromaflage skin and active stealth systems, flanked by decoys to confuse and mislead, orchestrating swarms of attack drones in an orgy of death and destruction across tens of square kilometers. The relentless pace of operations, a desperate shortage of spares to repair battle damage from too many near misses, and an increasing reliance on whatever ordnance the NRA could steal from the Hammers had seen to that. Now Widowmaker fought its battles the way ground-attack landers used to fight: up close and in person.
Michael’s concern was well founded; the Kingfishers’ targeting information came from the battlesat radars overhead, radars the AI controlling Widowmaker’s stealth system was struggling to defeat. By now the Hammer commanders would know that there were three Fed landers squatting on Perdan airport’s apron like big, fat sitting ducks. He shivered; Kingfishers were the least of his problems. The Hammers might be tempted to ignore the prohibition on using orbital kinetics to attack targets in towns and cities. Three Fed landers might be a target too tempting to resist even if it meant destroying much of Perdan, the enormous political cost a price worth paying. The thought that Hammer kinetics were being retasked to take the landers out chased yet more shivers across his skin. Come on, come on, he urged the absent NRAs.
He commed Sedova in Alley Kat. “Any luck?”
“No, sir,” Sedova said. “How long do we wait?”
Michael blew out hard in frustration. “One more minute … no, wait.” Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he decided. “We have to assume they’re on their way,” he said, “so ramps down. Start off-loading.”
“You sure, sir?”
“No, but do it anyway. Widowmaker, out. Loadmaster, ramp down, start off-loading. Jayla?”
“Sir?”
“You, Bienefelt, Fodor, and Carmellini. Get out on the apron. I don’t want us getting surprised.”
“Sir.”
A moment later, Widowmaker’s flight deck was deserted. His anxiety growing by the second, Michael kept his eyes on the threat plot; still nothing new and no sign of any Hammer Kingfishers. Their time on the ground was—
“Command, tac. Our friends are here.”
“Authenticated okay?”
“They have. A Colonel Nussli, like we were briefed. I’m glad we started off-loading early.”
“Me, too,” Michael said, relief flooding through him. “Matti, get your team back onboard.”
Off-loading was a quick business. Widowmaker’s AI-controlled cargo handlers rammed the containers out onto the apron, and each was hustled away into the rain-drenched darkness by a small army of NRA troopers.
“Command, loadmaster. We’re done. Closing up. We can go.”
“Roger, sir. Flight deck crew’s on their way back.”
Michael wasted no time waiting for them to take their seats. With a quick check to make sure Widowmaker’s main engines would not incinerate anyone, he commed Mother to take control; seconds later they were rolling back onto the runway and into the air, followed by Alley Kat and Hell Bent.
“Welcome back,” he said to Ferreira when she dropped into her seat alongside him, spraying raindrops in all directions. “The forward controller’s given us our first target, so let’s do it. Weaps?”
“Ready,” Bienefelt said. “Grapple Three Three has downloaded targeting.”
“Roger. Sensors, where the hell are those Kingfishers?”
“Don’t know, sir,” Carmellini said. “Every other time they’ve been on us like a rash.”
“Keep looking. Bastards are out there somewhere.”
With one eye on the threat plot, Michael watched while Mother rolled the lander into the attack, the target obvious when Widowmaker burst into clear air: a cluster of plascrete government buildings in the center of Perdan that were home to those Hammer defenders too dumb to stop fighting. In quick succession, the three landers unloaded their ordnance across the area, fin-retarded iron bombs, old-fashioned but nonetheless ideal for the job and fused to explode after penetration. Clusterbots followed bombs, a lethal swarm of black shapes guided by sensors to take out any soft targets: people, vehicles, light armor, missile launchers.
Not that the Fed landers had things all their own way. The instant they appeared, the sky erupted into a maelstrom of defensive fire, cannon shells stitching wavering lines through the air before locking on to Widowmaker, its hull racketing with the pock pock pock of hits before defensive lasers were able to respond. Then came the missiles, a mix of shoulder-launched Goombahs and the heavier, vehicle-mounted Gondors, silver-white streaks appearing out of the darkness, lethal fingers of light reaching for the lander. Faster than Michael could think, Widowmaker’s lasers hacked the missiles out of the attack … all but one. A single Gondor survived, smashing into Widowmaker, hitting on the port side well aft, the lander sagging and wallowing as systems alarms told Michael the bad news.
“Command, systems,” Chief Fodor said. “Port cooling pump offline; not recoverable. Executing emergency shutdown of Fusion A.”
“Command, roger,” Michael said, ignoring a sudden stab of fear. Without Fusion A, the lander was down to one power plant, slow and vulnerable; he had to hope the missing Kingfishers stayed away.
Ferreira asked the obvious question. “Abort?”
For a moment, Michael hesitated. Aborting meant leaving the NRA attack unsupported. Staying risked the precious lander. Screw it, he decided; they were there to fight. “Negative, tac. Stay with it.”
“Tac, roger.”
Michael took a quick look at the holovid feed from Widowmaker’s aft holocams as she climbed away, sluggish and unresponsive. Not a building was intact; some still had walls, but most were smoking ruins. Good one, he said to himself before looking at Widowmaker’s next target: a cluster of armored vehicles trying to break through an NRA blocking force straddling the northern approaches to the town. Antiarmor clusterbots made short work of them, the Hammer armor vanishing underneath a rolling cloud of smoke and flame.
“Tac, tell our controller we have ordnance for one more run, so make it a good one.”
“Stand by … on the plot … target confirmed and accepted.”
Michael grunted when Mother reefed the lander around hard. Then the last target for the day was past and gone, a Hammer defensive position constructed around a cluster of wrecked storage silos disappearing behind boiling clouds of plascrete, torn apart by Widowmaker’s cannons and lasers before iron bombs finished the job.
“Command, tac. Grapple Three Three says thanks. We can go home. Alley Kat and Hell Bent remaining on task.”
“Command, roger,” Michael said. “Go!” he snapped, and Mother pushed the lander’s remaining fusion plant to emergency power, pulling the lander around until Widowmaker ran south toward safety, the icons littering the threat plot turning a comforting orange as Mother eased the lander down, the ground below a chaotic mat of gray-black streaks.
Michael was sure the threat plot was wrong. The Hammers had more than enough time to launch Kingfishers from Ojan and McNair, but ENCOMM was saying that both bases were quiet, with the marines from Amokran still committed to the diversionary attacks on Bretonville and Daleel. It made no sense. Why were the Hammers not responding to the attack on Perdan?
“Tac, where the hell are those Kingfishers?” he asked, even though he knew the question was pointless. If Ferreira knew, so would the threat plot, and it did not.
“Not seeing them,” Ferreira replied, “and we have nothi
ng from ENCOMM, either.”
“I don’t like this, not one bit,” Michael muttered, forcing himself to sit back and let Mother get them home. “Maybe there’s some—”
In an instant, the flight deck was filled with the cacophonous racket of threat alarms. “Alaric missiles inbound,” Carmellini said, slapping the alarms off. “Missiles have gone active,” he added. “They’re in terminal guidance mode.” The threat plot confirmed Michael’s worst fears: too many missiles moving too fast from too many directions for Widowmaker’s defenses to defeat. A pair of heavy landers like Alley Kat and Hell Bent might have a chance of surviving; a lone light lander like Widowmaker did not.
Now Michael and the rest of Widowmaker’s crew could do nothing but watch. Dumping the last of her precious decoys into Widowmaker’s wake, Mother rolled the lander over in a desperate bid to get even closer to the ground, ramming the fusion plant to full power in a futile attempt to outrun the incoming missiles, their terminal guidance system a lethal hybrid of optical, radar, and laser sensors even the best electronic countermeasures in humanspace would struggle to deceive.
Michael swore; maybe he should have held Widowmaker back until Alley Kat and Hell Bent came off task. Not that it mattered; it was too late. The Hammers had learned from their mistakes that making their presence known too early gave the landers the time they needed to accelerate away from the Alarics. Guided by track data from the battlesat radars overhead, they must have come in low, slow, and stealthy, probably from the sea, where there were no inquisitive NRA eyes to report their passing, before unloading their missiles. Heart hammering, Michael watched Mother do her best, the lander twisting and jinking in a final attempt to distract the missiles. But there were too many of them, and even though some were seduced by Widowmaker’s decoys, even though some were distracted by jammers, the rest were not, enough getting past the defensive lasers to doom the lander.
Mother stopped trying to save Widowmaker, shifting her focus onto surviving the attack long enough to save the crew, wrenching the lander nose-up to force the missiles to impact the most heavily armored part of the hull, Widowmaker’s belly, screams of pain from the lander’s neural system ignored as the foamalloy wings, stressed well beyond the point of failure, disintegrated under the impossible pressure of onrushing air.
Michael swore the lander stopped when the Alarics smashed home, three of them hitting a microsecond apart, their enormous kinetic energy and explosive warheads hurling Widowmaker back, up, and over into a death roll to the ground. He lost consciousness for an instant before the automated ejection system hurled him and the rest of the crew out into the night. In front of them, Widowmaker tumbled to a fiery death on the rocks below, missile after missile smashing into her carcass, her passing marked by a spectacular white fireball when fusion plants lost containment. Barely aware of what was happening, Michael was knocked out again by the shattering crash of his escape capsule plowing into the ground.
How long he lay there, he had no idea. When he awoke, it was strangely peaceful, the only sound the rain drumming an insistent tattoo on the protective plasfiber cover of the capsule. Almost too tired to move, he commed the capsule to release him, which it did, dumping him unceremoniously down the slope.
“Oh shit,” he whispered. He commed painkiller drugbots into his system to combat a growing chorus of protest from a badly abused body; as ever, his left leg was the most vocal of all. Forcing himself to his feet, he climbed out of his combat space suit, throwing it to the ground, where it lay, looking disconcertingly like a dead body. “Won’t be needing that bastard thing again,” he said to the night air.
Reenergized by the drugbots, he had his neuronics scan for the rest of Widowmaker’s crew. To his intense relief, first one, then another and another beacon came online until the whole crew had been accounted for. Comming the rendezvous point to them, he set off.
By the time everyone turned up, Michael did not know whether to laugh or cry. A sorrier bunch he had never seen, his crew sporting an impressive collection of cuts and fast-blossoming bruises. With a silent “thank you” to the unknown engineers who had designed and built Widowmaker’s crew escape system, Michael asked the question on his and everyone else’s mind.
“Where to from here?”
Wincing as she lifted her arm, Ferreira pointed in the general direction of Perdan. “That way. Closest friendlies. Our bases in the Branxtons are too far away.”
“Anyone disagree?” he asked. “No? Okay, Perdan it is. Anyone having trouble walking, for chrissakes let me know. Matti, take point. Single file and make sure your chromaflage capes are working and neuronics are off. I don’t think the Hammers will come looking for us, but you never know. Let’s go.”
In silence, Widowmaker’s crew set off after Chief Bienefelt. Limping along behind them, Michael knew how lucky they had been. They had been ambushed with the lander Widowmaker running slowly; if both fusion plants had been online, it would have been moving at full speed. Then no crew escape system could have saved them, ejection into the fast-moving airstream more than enough to tear capsule and occupants apart.
Bienefelt’s hand went up. The small column stopped while she scanned the ground ahead. Perdan was visible beyond under a thick pall of smoke. “I think we’re there. Hard to tell, but I think I saw NRA pickets up ahead, which means their outer sensor line can’t be far away. According to the ops plan, the 48th has this sector. I’ll go and make sure they don’t start shooting at us.”
“Watch out for the slugs, Matti,” Michael said. Fitted with optical sensors feeding a simple fire-control system linked to a pulsed laser, the ground-attack drones the NRA called slugs were deployed to secure the outer approaches to a fixed position. The size and shape of a large tortoise, slugs were cheap and nasty. The average grunt hated them. Occasionally, slugs would ignore the IFF—identification friend or foe—patches worn by every trooper in combat; they might be cheap and nasty, but they were still lethally dangerous.
“I will,” Bienefelt said, dropping to her stomach and crawling forward. “I don’t trust the bloody things, either. I’ll be back, so don’t go anywhere.”
“We won’t.” Too tired to care much anymore, his body racked by pain, Michael slumped to the ground.
“You okay, skipper?” Ferreira asked, frowning with concern.
“Yeah, Jayla. Everything hurts like fury, but unless my neuronics are lying, it’s nothing serious. Just aches, strains, and sprains, How about you?”
“Same. That was one hell of a ride.”
“Those Hammers were waiting for us,” Michael said with a grimace. “That was planned.”
“That idea had occurred to me. Wondered why we hadn’t seen them.”
“Interesting, though,” Michael said. “They didn’t give a shit how much damage we inflicted on Perdan’s defenders. All they cared about was getting us. Cold-blooded but smart, damn smart … bastards,” he added with feeling.
It hit him. “Shit,” he said. “What about Alley Kat and Hell Bent? You heard anything?”
Ferreira shook her head. “Nothing. I’m hoping they’re okay. We’d have heard their beacons if they ejected, but there’s nothing. I think we triggered the ambush too early.”
“I hope so. Losing Widowmaker’s bad enough, but one of our heavies? What a disaster. Losing two doesn’t even bear thinking about.”
The uncomfortable silence was broken by Bienefelt’s return. “Come on, you lot,” she said with a beaming smile. “It is the 48th NRA, and they’ve put the coffee on for us.”
Much cheered by the prospect of one of the NRA’s trademark brews, hot and aromatic, Michael climbed to his feet and trudged off after Bienefelt.
“I’ve spoken to brigade,” the colonel commanding the 48th said. “They want you to make your way to the 120th to link up with the rest of the Feds.”
Michael’s heart soared, buoyed by the prospect of seeing Anna again after so many weeks apart. “Any idea what happens after that, Colonel?” he asked.
“No, sorry. Just that I’m to provide you with an escort and guide to make sure you get there okay. There are still a few Hammers we haven’t accounted for. I can’t spare any recon drones to watch your flanks, so keep your eyes open.”
“Fine, sir. When do we go?”
“Now … Fenech!”
“Sir,” a corporal standing off to one side said, stepping forward smartly.
“Off you go. Don’t lose any.”
“Sir.”
The colonel turned to Michael. “Good luck,” he said, shaking his hand.
“Thanks. You, too.”
Michael started to salute, catching himself just in time. Not a good idea on the battlefield, he reminded himself. Pausing to draw assault rifles, power packs, and ammunition, they set off, Corporal Fenech’s section in a loose screen around them as they moved past the blackened shells of the firebases and defensive positions the Hammers had thrown up in a ring to secure Perdan’s perimeter and entered the outer suburbs proper.
To Michael’s surprise, the first few kilometers showed few signs that a major battle had been fought for Perdan that day. The roads were clear of debris, and there were no barricades or any other sign of organized resistance, the only evidence of combat the odd broken window and occasionally a mobibot damaged by rifle fire. The city was eerily empty, not a single Perdan local in sight, the neat houses that flanked the road silent and dark, not a light visible in the gloom. Where the hell is everybody? Michael wondered.
Fenech pushed on fast—Michael was relieved to see that his patrol was alert, heads swiveling all the time like they were on sticks—and soon proof of the day’s fighting became all too obvious. Must have been when the defenders worked out that they could no longer escape Perdan to the west, toward McNair and safety, Michael realized. The streets were filled with the remains of makeshift barricades, the bodies of dead PGDF troopers and smoke-blackened wrecks of their light armor speaking volumes about the ferocious fighting that must have taken place. Michael’s heart sank when he saw the problem the NRA faced firsthand. Perdan’s suburbs were indefensible: gently rolling terrain, untroubled by creeks or rivers, with broad streets flanked by low buildings set well back. Once Hammer kinetics had reduced Perdan’s outer ring of defenses to smoking ruins, marine heavy armor would roll into town along the highway from Bretonville in the west and Daleel in the east, unstoppable, any serious NRA resistance blown out of the way by marine ground-attack landers. With marine support, even the PGDF would have little trouble retaking the town, its NRA defenders pushed back and back until they could retreat no more; they would die where they fought.
Helfort’s War Book 4: The Battle for Commitment Planet Page 26
